1971

1971

Johanna Hamilton co-produced Pray the Devil Back to Hell, the gripping account of a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia, a nation torn to shreds by a decades old civil war. It premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, and was later short-listed for an Academy Award. It has been shown at hundreds of festivals and grassroots screenings all over the world. In fall 2011, it spearheaded the PBS mini-series Women, War & Peace. The series won the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award for best documentary. She has produced non-fiction programs for PBS, The History Channel, A&E, Discovery Channel, The Washington Post/Newsweek Productions and New York Times Television, amongst others. Johanna began her career in the dramatic run-up to the 1994 first all-race elections in South Africa. She went on to work on the country’s premier investigative magazine program, Carte Blanche. She has worked all over Africa, Europe and North America and received numerous awards for her work. She is an alumnus of the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant and the Sundance Documentary + Composers Lab. Johanna is a graduate of the University of London and holds an MA in Broadcast Journalism from New York University. 1971is her documentary feature debut.

Film Synopsis: On March 8, 1971 eight ordinary citizens broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, a town just outside Philadelphia, took hundreds of secret files, and shared them with the public. In doing so, they uncovered the FBI’s vast and illegal regime of spying and intimidation of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.

Despite searching for the people behind the heist in one of the largest investigations ever conducted, the FBI never solved the mystery of the break-in, and the identities of the members of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI remained a secret. Until now…